


calculated risk

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: F/M, Gen, Kuzuryu Fuyuhiko Swears, Love Confessions, Love Letters, Middle School Akwardness, Poet Peko, Seriously he has a potty mouth, Unrequited Crush, shcherbatskayas content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 15:53:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13814469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: It starts with a broken bench.





	calculated risk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewildwilds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewildwilds/gifts).



> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I just like honors student Peko befriending delinquient Fuyuhiko. I also like writing 7000 words when I meant to write 5000 and writing in study halls. Thanks to Anh for talking about this AU with me a bunch and I hope you all enjoy!

The bench sits in front of her, clearly broken, and Peko shifts her weight from foot to foot, considering her options. She guesses that the storm over the weekend is what took it out, leaving the bench with a crack in the middle and making it useless. She supposes that she could try and sit on it anyways, but then she’d be awkwardly leaning to one side for the entirety of her lunch period and so would her tray, and that is a disaster waiting to happen 

Then there’s simply going back inside. Peko wrinkles her nose at the idea, but it’s a valid one. The cafeteria is crowded and loud, a big place to not have any friends, and she doubts her ability to find and convince the few acquaintances she’s managed to make since middle school to let her sit with them. And there’s no room in that place for her to sit by herself, which is why she started eating in the courtyard in the first place, so she would have no option but to play the bargaining game. That idea is somehow less appealing to losing her lunch tray to the slant of a broken bench, so she writes it off as quickly as she wrote it in. 

There’s the ground, too, she supposes, and a few people do sit there. But there’s also ants in there, and Peko is okay with sharing food with other humans, but the idea of splitting her lunch with bugs makes her stomach turn. It’s not that she’s afraid of them (Peko reckons that she’s the only person in their class that isn’t, since she always ends up being the one who has to kill them), but she doesn’t like them, either. She’ll leave the fawning over bugs to Gonta. 

So, that gives Peko one last option: Find another bench. All of the rest of them are full, except for one. The one right next to hers has just one person on it, and Peko hesitates to ask them anything. She’s only known Fuyuhiko for the few months they’ve been in class together, and while he hasn’t directly insulted her (actually, she doesn’t think he’s spoken to her at all), she’s heard him enough to know that he has a temper, that he’s the exact opposite of sociable, that he gets more detentions in two weeks than the rest of the class has ever had in their lives combined, and that asking to sit with him is bound to get her a rejection. Probably. She’s also seen him be unexpectedly nice once or twice, usually to Mikan or the new kid with spiky hair whose name hasn’t quite stuck in Peko’s head yet. So maybe she has a chance. A low chance, sure, but a chance. And if it goes poorly, it goes poorly, and that’ll be the end of it. There’s nothing for her to lose here. 

She approaches the bench cautiously, trying to judge from a distance what sort of mood Fuyuhiko is in. He has his headphones in his ears and he seems to be frowning at nothing in particular, but it’s not an angry frown. Just a natural downturn of the lips. Peko knows her own face does something similar, so she doesn’t judge that to be an indicator that her mission is doomed. In fact, if he has the same sort of disposition as her, maybe they can just happily ignore each other and she can get through lunch without dealing with broken benches or surprise insults. 

When she gets just a few feet away, Fuyuhiko looks over at her. Peko takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out as subtly as she can. He takes out one of his earbuds, and Peko takes it as her cue to speak. “Do you mind if I sit here?” 

Fuyuhiko’s frown deepens until he looks just a bit past Peko at the broken bench. Then he looks back at her, and Peko searches his face for anger, for a sign that he’s going to tell her to fuck off and die, and okay, his gaze is intense, but it isn’t violent. He looks like he’s searching her for something. Some sort of malicious intent, maybe. Peko knows she’s done the same thing before. After one too many pranks involving boys pretending to ask her out or girls pretending to want to be her friend, it’s a natural reaction. Luckily, most of them grew out of it by their first year of middle school, or maybe Peko just became too intimidating to try that sort of thing on. Maybe Fuyuhiko was the same in that respect, although she looked at the unbuttoned collar of his school uniform and thought of the stories she had heard and determined that their forms of intimidation were very different. It was the same structure, but the devil was in the details, the details that brought Peko to textbooks and Fuyuhiko to detention. 

“Sure. Knock yourself out.” He says, not kind but not cruel, either. She sits on the other side of the bench, leaving a respectable amount of distance between them, and starts to eat her lunch. 

“Thank you.” Peko says. He lets out a sound of acknowledgement and puts his earbud back in. 

Fuyuhiko keeps his music loud and Peko can hear it despite his headphones. She can’t make out the lyrics, but whatever he’s listening to has a lot of bass and the rhythm of it sticks in her head as she takes bites of her food. She finds herself tapping her foot to the beat, quietly but certainly as she makes her way through her lunch. Fuyuhiko picks at his food, maybe not hungry or maybe just not fond of what the cafeteria was serving up today. He’s only halfway done when Peko finishes, and he’s halfway through the half when Peko returns from putting her tray away. 

When she sits back down, Peko looks through her bag and finds her notebook and a pen. She usually used the spare time between when she finished her lunch and the end of the lunch period for fixing up her poetry, and that isn’t going to change just because she has silent company. Still, Peko’s never edited this close to another person, not since the incident two years ago when one of her classmates snatched her notebook and started reading it out loud, and so she can’t help but be uneasy. She hides it well but the fear is still there, thrumming under her skin like something alive in its own right. Peko wonders if it’s something that’s even capable of dying. 

Fuyuhiko leaves, and then Fuyuhiko comes back, and he doesn’t say anything to her until Peko scribbles out a line and her pen runs out of ink. She goes to grab another one from her bag, but Fuyuhiko beats her to it. He pulls a pen out of his pocket and holds it out in her direction. It’s a cheap thing, Bic, probably, bound to last for maybe a week and most likely bought in one of those five-for-five hundred yen packs. Peko takes it from him as gently as she would take the crown jewels. 

“Thank you.” She says again. 

Fuyuhiko nods, which she assumes is delinquent code for telling her that it’s no problem. “What assignment’s that for?”

“It’s not for an assignment.” Peko admits, deciding not to make up an assignment if only because he seems like he’d call her out on it in less than a second. The words still aren’t as certain as she’d like them, though. 

“You’re writin’ for fun, then?” Fuyuhiko’s face is indecipherable to her. The expression on his face is either curiosity or contempt, and Peko isn’t close enough to him to tell the difference. Maybe she’s due for a change in her glasses prescription. 

“Mhmm.” Peko manages, and it’s not quite words, but it’s close enough. She always does so much better when she doesn’t actually have to force words from her throat. They come so much easier from her hands. They always have. She wonders if maybe her voice box actually resides somewhere in her elbow, and then she absently scribbles that thought in the margins with her Fuyuhiko-given pen because that’s a line she could use for something later. 

“Huh.” Fuyuhiko considers the information he’s been given and Peko finds herself feeling nervous as to what he’ll do with it. She expects a lot of things, but what she doesn’t expect is for the silence to drag on until the bell rings and for him to declare “Cool,” before getting up to head back to class.

Peko gets up as well, and they walk back to the classroom together in silence, only parting when they get to the doorway. 

***

The next day, the bench is still broken and Peko makes it to the courtyard before Fuyuhiko (their bio teacher said something about wanting to talk to him after class, so it isn’t a surprise), so she sits down on one edge of the bench, making a point of making room for him. She wonders if maybe it was too presumptuous to sit there, wonders if maybe she ought to have wandered around and let him get there first and ask again, but it’s too late for that now, so Peko stays where she is and splits her tray in half: one half is food, one half is for math homework. 

When Fuyuhiko arrives, Peko is done with a good portion of her lunch and has finished only three problems. He seems to be in some sort of mood since he doesn’t respond to Peko’s polite “Hello,” so Peko decides it might be best to leave him alone for now. When compared to yesterday’s picking, Fuyuhiko seems utterly voracious today, all but shoveling the rice into his mouth. 

“Akiyama is a bitch.” He says, not giving Peko any warning that he might speak at all. Fuyuhiko’s voice shakes her from her math-induced coma (Everything but math, she could do everything in the world but math) and she considers the statement. Sure, Mrs. Akiyama is certainly strict and maybe more harsh on some students than she needs to—only God knows how many times she’s made Mikan cry in class—but she’s always left Peko alone and had a habit of drawing smiles on tests that she got a perfect on, so Peko couldn’t hold too much malice towards her. 

“I suppose so.” Peko agrees after thinking the words over. 

“You outta more than _suppose_ it.” Fuyuhiko mutters, doing a shockingly accurate impersonation of Peko. “Didn’t ya hear what she called me earlier today before she made me stay for like, ten minutes after class? Said I was a stain on the community. Stain on the community! Like people are stains instead of things that are actually alive. And I know you heard what she said to Oowari ‘bout her test score in front of everybody. And sure, Oowari might be as dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to bio, but she didn’t have to let the whole world know about it. She’s a grade-A bitch, I swear. Passed her bitch test, got her bitch licence, and drives that shit everywhere. Her personality is the bitch equivalent of a Ferrari.” 

Peko lets out a snort at his analysis, one that was trying to be a laugh and got mixed up somewhere along the way. Even if it isn’t as dramatic as Fuyuhiko’s saying, it’s still funny to hear him say it. He has a way with words, Peko’s noticed. Particularly, insulting words. If she ever decides to write a story, Peko makes a note to go to him for dialogue issues because he seems to have speaking all figured out. She takes another bite of her food, a small smile crossing her face for a second. 

“You know I’m right.” He says. 

“The sentiment surely is.” Peko agrees, and Fuyuhiko looks at her like she’s grown a second head before turning back to his lunch, and so Peko returns to hers. 

The silence stays a little while longer, and Peko is working on the math again when Fuyuhiko speaks up. “What do you even write about? Like, if you don’t write for school bullshit.”

It takes Peko a good while to process the fact that someone is actually asking her a question about herself like they want to know the answer to it. It’s a mildly surreal experience for her, being asked something like that, like she stuck her hand in a blender and turned it on and none of the blades so much as nicked her skin. “I’m not writing now.” She says, too stunned to answer the question itself. 

“Yeah, I figured, wise guy. Writing never involves that many numbers.” He shakes his head and Peko thinks that she might have killed any curiosity he has before he asks again. “But when you do write, what’s it about?”

“..A lot of things. Usually about things I’ve seen or things I’ve heard mentioned.” Peko thinks about the notebook that sits in her bag, the one that isn’t used for note taking and math homework, and she wants to grab it now, but no. She has work to do, and Peko is nothing if not disciplined. “I write poetry, mostly.”

“You any good at it?” Fuyuhiko asks, swatting at a nearby fly. 

“Not yet, but I’m getting better.” Peko tells him this as confidently as she can. If she’d let other people read any of it, maybe she’d know for sure, but Peko hasn’t found anyone who’s cared enough to ask to see it and she hasn’t found the courage to insist on showing it. Maybe she’d find it someday. Maybe that day will come soon. Peko doesn’t know. 

“Well, that’s something. Maybe you can finally knock Takenaka off of his pedestal in the composition department, then. He keeps bragging ‘bout his perfect scores like he thinks it means something.” Fuyuhiko scoffs, and Peko tries not to be scandalized because not only do the scores really do matter (or at least, they matter to her), but she’s also had something of a giant crush on Arata Takenaka for about as long as she can remember. And sure, most of their conversations were about school and most of his friends were mean, but Arata was smart and kind and beautiful in the way that ancient Greek statues were beautiful. Until that moment, she had yet to find someone with a mean word to say about him. 

“Well, he is quite good. I understand why he would talk about it.” Peko’s attempt to defend him is weak, but at least she makes an attempt. 

“Doesn’t mean I care to listen to him talk about it, though. His ego is the size of the sun, and that’s sayin’ something, coming from me. According to Akiyama, my ego clogs up the whole room.” Fuyuhiko sounds more than a little bitter about it, but bitter in a distantly amused way, and when the bell rings, he talks about exactly what she said to Peko, who finds herself intrigued less by what he’s saying but more by how he’s saying it. She finds herself thinking about his voice, about the words he cuts off and clips around to get to the point and the ones he draws out for the same reason, about the tangents he goes on despite all of his attempts to stick to the point and how those tangents always end up going back to the main point anyhow, and Peko finds that she rather likes listening to him speak. 

This time, they walk into class together, and part when Peko is halfway to her desk. 

*** 

Fuyuhiko hasn’t skipped a single day this week. The fact only hits Peko on Thursday, four days after their temporary lunch arrangement. It’s unusual for him. Normal he cuts out right around lunch, but lately, he’s been staying. At the moment, he’s looking over the ugly notebook, the one filled with scribbles and line changes and all sorts of nonsense, flipping from page to page as careful as an archaeologist who found some great and ancient tablet. She’s nervous, but maybe not as nervous as she should be. He had asked to see one of her finished ones and Peko decided to hand him the drafts instead, decided to trust him with something small and secret to her. She still doesn’t understand why she did it, just that she did and that this was what was happening now. 

“You’ve got talent.” He declares, handing the book back to her. “The real kind, too. The shit that people talk about on those news specials about like, Olympians and whatever. How do you do it?”

“Practice, mostly.” Peko says, unsure what to do with the praise. An uncertain smile makes its way to her face and she clutches the book close to her chest. She gave Fuyuhiko a little piece of her, and he turned it back safe and sound with praise surrounding it. And Fuyuhiko, he returns that smile, equally uncertain before he launches into a story about Saionji and how she all but killed him by spraying hairspray directly in his face. The story tempts a laugh out of her, one just as shaky as the smile, but it’s there. 

Peko thinks that ought to count for something. 

***

Next Monday, the bench is fixed. Peko looks at it, looks at where she sat with Fuyuhiko, and sits down where she’s been for the past week. If Fuyuhiko notices, he says nothing about it, and Peko is beyond grateful.

***

Peko doesn’t know how it happened, really, but by the end of two weeks, she’s pretty sure she’s made friends with her class’s most infamous delinquent. Not only do they sit together at lunch, but when their English teacher announced a translation project, there was suddenly no longer a question about who Peko would work with. There was no uncertainty, no awkward waiting, no shuffling of feet and hopeful glances. Just a quick gravitation towards Fuyuhiko’s desk when he was already halfway to her. They met in the middle of the room, papers in hand, and sat down in two desks that had been mostly left alone, shoving them together to make one. 

“We’re gonna kill this project.” Fuyuhiko said, and Peko nodded along because she believed him. What Peko lacked in conjugation and tense skills in English, she made up for in creativity. It was easy, really. Peko chose the words, and Fuyuhiko put them in the right form. And sure, they got more than a few odd looks, but they didn’t just get a good grade on the project—they got the _best_ grade, a 100% with nice comments written in cherry-red ink. 

“That’s impressive.” Arata says to her right before she goes off to lunch on the day that she and Fuyuhiko get the grade back. “About the translation, I mean. I never would’ve thought of putting it like that.”

“Thank you.” Peko ducks her head, a nod of gratefulness, a smile beginning to build up somewhere in her throat. She can feel it arriving, almost there, but when she looks up at Arata to give it to him, he’s gone.

Fuyuhiko is there, though, raising an eyebrow at her. “Him?” He asks, but it’s not really a question, and Peko sees no point in denying it. 

“Him.” She confirms, pink in the face as they embark down the hall. 

Fuyuhiko considers this information and Peko can all but see the cogs in his head turning. “Well, you could do worse.” He finally says, and Peko takes that as approval. 

***

Two weeks turns into a month, a month into two months, and Peko is aware of two things: the first is that Fuyuhiko has only skipped three days in two months (and one of those was for an actual stomach flu), and the second is that people have begun talking about her. To her, as well, but also about her. 

“Didn’t take her as the bad boy type.” She remembers someone muttering when they stood in the lunchline together. 

“Well, the world is full of surprises!” Ibuki said to them, and she nearly ended up smacking Peko in the face with her excited hand gesture. 

“How did that even happen?” A freshman asked as they walked by in the hallway, Fuyuhiko telling an animated tale about his sister while Peko wondered if it would be weird to write a poem about the way her friend’s hands moved when he spoke. 

“Can you believe it? Kuzuryuu is actually showing up to school now.” Saionji noted one day in gym class. 

“Think it’s because of Pekoyama?” Sato asked, her eyes never quite moving from the ball that floated somewhere nearby.

“Oh, no question.” She said, either not knowing or not caring that Peko was there. Knowing Saionji, it was the latter. 

One day, Peko decides to ask him herself. “Why did you stop skipping? I like that you’re here, but...It’s odd. One day, you just started showing up.”

“Because this place is actually bearable now.” Fuyuhiko tells her, making a point of not looking at her. The tips of his ears are red, and he shuffles in his seat. “School’s a miserable place to not have a friend—and don’t get me wrong, I still hate it here—but it’s easier when you’ve got somebody to suffer with.”

“Oh.” The noise comes out of Peko’s throat involuntarily, startled and flattered all at once. “I know what you mean.”

“I figured you would. You just seem to understand that kind of shit.” Fuyuhiko says through a mouth full of rice. Peko is stunned out of words, so she sits there in the silence, and fully manages a smile. It’s a real one, a good one, one that reaches all the way to her eyes and doesn’t make it look like she’s grimacing and Fuyuhiko blinks at her like he’s got sunspots in his eyes, but Peko knows where the sun is. It’s not behind her head. It’s to the left of her, and it’s hidden behind a cloud, so it can’t be blinding him. There’s no real reason for him to blink at her like that, but it makes Peko feel content. Happy. Like maybe she’s somebody worth looking at. 

***

One day, when it’s starting to get just a little too cold to eat outside but neither one of them really care and they’ve been friends for so long that they’ve stopped keeping track of how long it’s been, Peko spends five whole minutes talking about Arata’s fancy new haircut, and Fuyuhiko comes up with an idea. One that pains him, sure, but he’ll put Peko’s heart ahead of his own here. 

“Why don’t you tell him that you like him?” He asks, simple and to the point. 

Peko’s eyes go wide and then they narrow, working to analyze him in the same way she analyzes a particularly confusing math problem. “Because he’s very, very far out of my league?”

“Peko, _nobody’s_ out of your league.” 

And again, Peko looks at him like he randomly started speaking Swahili instead of Japanese, and Fuyuhiko is a little embarrassed by the honesty of his statement, but he’s sticking by it. 

“Well, if I get a rejection, I could at least move on. And if I don’t…” Peko doesn’t dare to let herself fully consider the possibilities of what could happen if he felt the same, but they come to mind anyhow and they stay there. Fuyuhiko can see them lingering, can feel them stick around like they’re in his own head instead of hers. 

“Exactly!” And sure, okay, Fuyuhiko doesn’t like the idea of Peko dating Takenaka fuckin’ Arata because he seems like a little bit of a pompous douche, but if Peko likes him, Fuyuhiko will trust it. Friendship is all about trust, and all this is and all this ever was going to be is friendship, so he’ll trust that there’s something good about Arata that he’s missing. Even if he did have a chance, he’d still trust Peko’s judgement. “It’s worth a shot.” 

“...I’ll do it. Not now, but I’ll do it.” Peko sounds firm in her resolution, and then she shoots up from the bench suddenly. “I have to go to the library.”

“For?”

“Research.”

“...On how to confess your feelings?”

“Of course.” Peko says, as if that’s the most logical thing to do in this situation. And Fuyuhiko can’t help himself: He follows her, trailing barely a quarter of a step behind, and by the time lunch is over, they’ve checked out half of the romance novels their school library has to offer, splitting the pile between them like gold. 

***

Fuyuhiko finds out that confessing, no matter how easy it may seem, is actually quite the process. Or at least, it’s quite the process if you’re someone as thorough as Peko is. First, there’s the pure amount of research that goes into it. Peko reads every book they grabbed on their library run and then a few more to get what she called the rhythm of it. She made notes and everything, all in her neat, swirly handwriting. Then there’s deciding when to do it. They settle on late November, close enough to the holiday that they can still spend some time together, but not too close that there’ll be a mad dash to get each other presents. After that is the how, and that is easy. It’s not even a matter of if she writes a letter or not: just a matter of what to say. 

That’s the worst part of it. The what to say. Peko fusses over every sentence, every word, every miniscule piece of punctuation. She works on it during lunch, occasionally sliding it over to him to see if a line or two sounds good. They communicate silently when it comes to the letter, in sidelong glances and notes in the cramped margins, and Fuyuhiko comes to the conclusion that Arata is the luckiest son of a bitch in Kobe, because what Peko writes him is art, plain and simple. She’s always been good, but she gets better with words by the day, and Fuyuhiko knows that he has nothing to do with it, but he can’t help but be proud anyways. 

The day before the planned confession, they go to the bookstore. Not for more research, no. This is for the stationary. 

Fuyuhiko’s never been inside of a bookstore like this one, where everything is cramped close together and smells distantly like coffee beans. It’s quiet and calm and Peko walks through it with the same confidence she does just about everything else.

“Red or blue?” She asks, holding out two ribbons in front of him. The ones dangling from her braids are white and frankly, no ribbons could ever live up to those, but Fuyuhiko points at the red one before going back to looking at the different notebooks. 

Thick, creamy paper. An enveloped that costs far more money than its worth. A pen, a nice one, not one of his dumb five-for-five hundred Bic ones. The pen looks so right sitting in her hands, and Fuyuhiko reminds himself to have a long conversation with Arata about just how much he doesn’t deserve to have Peko and how he better be nice to her or he’ll prove the rumor that he cracked Suzuki Akihiro’s ribs with a baseball bat true, but he’ll prove it on Arata's head instead. That’ll be a fun conversation. 

When they part, Fuyuhiko can see the nervous, excited energy buzzing off of Peko. It’s subtle, and to most of the world, she looks almost unnaturally composed, but he can see it. He can see it, and it makes his chest hurt in a way that Peko could probably write a very lovely poem about. 

***

Peko sends him a picture of the letter when she’s done with it. Fuyuhiko knows the words by heart now, but he reads them again just to feel them and checks what she asked for: Is her handwriting too loopy to be read? Are any characters running into each other? Should she have gone for lined paper? Does the ink color look nice on the paper? They’re all questions Fuyuhiko would have never considered, but he considers them now and comes to the conclusion that it’s perfect, and the next day, before homeroom begins, Fuyuhiko sees the envelope pressed between two textbooks, can see the ribbon jutting out of it, and he sits on his hands to keep himself from reaching out and touching it. 

“I’m going to give it to him during lunch.” She whispers, as sly and secretive as she would be if what they were doing was a legitimate spy mission. “He walks through the courtyard by himself, and I don’t want to give it to him in front of all of his friends.”

“Good move.” Fuyuhiko compliments, trying not to wonder if this means he’ll be sitting by himself at lunch from now on. He’s gotten used to company, and he’d miss it if it was gone, and moving to Arata’s table would be far too obvious unless someone invited him. “That’ll give him some time to read it, too.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Peko says, and her eyes crinkle just a little bit at the corners. It’s a microscopic movement, but Fuyuhiko is close enough to see it. Before she can say anything else about the matter, the bell rings and she returns to her desk. All morning, Fuyuhiko can see her tapping her foot, glancing at the clock, rushing through schoolwork and then sitting statue still, occasionally glancing back at him. Her restlessness blends in with the mood of the class, but it stands out to him anyhow. Fuyuhiko can’t imagine how intense the feeling is if she’s actually expressing it, and some of it floats towards him and rests in his own head as they wait for the lunch bell. 

Each minute goes by molasses slow. Peko is watching the clock and Arata and occasionally taking a break to look out the window or over at Fuyuhiko. Fuyuhiko, meanwhile, is watching the clock and Arata and the window and Peko, silently praying to every god he knows that this works out in her favor because yeah, her getting a boyfriend would suck for him, but the idea of Peko getting a rejection from someone she’s been crushing on since elementary school stings in a way he can’t bear to think about. He watches Peko actually talk to Arata during the break. They’ve been talking more, talking enough to count as acquaintances, and he’s silently proud of her boldness in the way that he’s loudly proud of everything else she’s done.

When lunch arrives, Peko all but runs out the door, Fuyuhiko right on her heels. “We have to get to the bench early.” She tells him, as if he doesn’t already know. 

“Yeah, yeah, got it. We’ll sit down, you’ll get it out, chill for a minute, and then it’s go time.” Fuyuhiko repeats what she told him earlier, except he changes her words so that they’re his own. She nods and when they make it to the bench, Peko sits down carefully. She smooths out her uniform skirt, takes out one of those tiny mirrors and checks her reflection in it, pushes up her glasses, and then takes out the letter. She re-ties the ribbon, making sure the bow is neat and perfect, and then sets it down on her lap.

“You’ve got this.” He tells her as she takes a deep breath. She closes her eyes and then opens them again. Fuyuhiko can see that she put a bit of mascara on in the morning because the black of it stains under her eye just so, a small display of inexperience. Natsumi would laugh at it if she were here, but Natsumi knows that Fuyuhiko cares about her, so the laughter would be followed by some sort of fix. Fuyuhiko doesn’t have one, and so he just gives her an awkward pat on the shoulder as Arata comes into view. “Now knock ‘em dead!”

She gives him a smile. It’s a small, fragile thing, but it’s there. And then she walks away, shoulders straight and steps even. She walks a little bit like royalty. Walks like she always knows where she’s going, even when she doesn’t. It’s taken months of seeing Peko and talking to her every day to find even the smallest hints of hesitance in anything she does, and even though Fuyuhiko knows Peko must be scared, there is no hesitance to be found in her walk. In that moment, Fuyuhiko knows that she’s going to be successful because who can say no to a walk like that? Who can be given the heart of someone who walks like a princess when they live in the slums of Kobe and then turn it away? Nobody can. Certainly nobody can.

Fuyuhiko looks down at his phone, not wanting to watch the scene too obviously, but he isn’t looking away, either. He sees Peko’s shoulders hunch in a bit before handing Arata the letter. Her back is to him, so Fuyuhiko can’t see her face, but he imagines the fragile smile from earlier is still there. The small, secret thing she trusted so few people with is being passed into Takenaka Arata’s perfect hands, and Fuyuhiko watches it happen from a distance. Arata ought to treasure it, to help put it somewhere where no harm will come to it, to make sure it stays as hopeful and wonderful as it is. He’s been given a gift that’s greater than Fuyuhiko can even dream of understanding, and so he better take care of it. Fuyuhiko will remind him of this later, but first, they have to get through this part of things.

When Arata throws the letter in the trash can, Fuyuhiko has to rub his eyes and then blink twice, because certainly he saw that wrong. Certainly he didn’t take Peko’s confession, well-crafted and comparable to some sort of Shakespeare something, and then throw it in the _garbage_. No way did that just happen. Nu-uh. 

Fuyuhiko’s body works on autopilot, taking him towards the pair before he can even process that he’s doing it. By the time he’s halfway there, he’s decided it’s too late to turn back. 

“Hey!” He calls out, aware of a few other people turning to look at him. He doesn’t care. Peko turns her head to look at him and there aren’t tears in her eyes, but there’s a stiffness in her expression that implies that she’s holding them back with all of her might, and that is beyond unacceptable. No one makes his best friend want to cry. Not on his watch. “Dude, what the hell is wrong with you?! Did you just throw her letter in the _trash_?!” 

“...Yes?” He says, more question than answer. 

“You’ve gotta be kidding me! A girl works up the guts to tell you how she feels, and you can’t even be bothered to read the damn letter? Who do you think you are, huh? She worked hard on that! Put time and energy into that! And you just threw it away.” Fuyuhiko shakes his head at him, and he can’t look down at Arata because Arata is taller than him, but the look Fuyuhiko gives him works well enough. Peko looks uncertain now, wringing her hands and staring at the garbage can like it contains her whole heart, and in a way, it really does. 

It’s then that he realizes that this piece of poetry can’t be lost to the Kobe Sanitation Department, so he stalks over to the garbage can (mostly empty, thank god), picks it up, walks back over towards them and pours the can’s contents on Arata’s head. They’re _definitely_ getting looks now, but Arata’s stunned and horrified silence is worth it, and he finds the letter safe and relatively unscathed, with the exception of a few grains of rice stuck to the envelope. Fuyuhiko dusts it off and hands the letter back to Peko, who takes it from him slowly, silent as a grave. 

“So, we’re going to give this another shot, eh?” Fuyuhiko crosses his arms over his chest as he talks to Arata. “Peko’s gonna give you her letter—as long as she still wants to—and you’re gonna sit down and you’re gonna read it. You’re gonna read the whole thing, and then you’re going to tell her if you feel the same, and if you don’t, you aren’t going to be a dick about it. Deal?”

The air is thick and heavy. The courtyard around them is almost entirely silent now. Beside him, Fuyuhiko sees Peko straighten up and clutch the letter tighter. 

“Deal.” Arata says, holding out his hand and waiting for the letter to be put in it. He’s covered in garbage, blinking rapidly, and Fuyuhiko is aware of the fact that he’s definitely going to get detention for this, but he doesn’t care. It’s worth it. 

“You still wanna give it to him?” Fuyuhiko asks, and all of his malice disappears in an instant. This is Peko’s choice, and no matter which one she makes, he’ll support it. 

“I don’t.” Peko decides, quiet and certain. She looks at Arata again and shakes her head. “You’re not who I thought you were. You’re nothing like yourself, Takenaka. Nothing at all.”

And then she turns her back to Arata and walks away, the same straightness in her shoulders and evenness in her steps that was there when she was walking towards him. 

“You were one lucky son of a bitch.” Fuyuhiko says. “You were probably the luckiest son of a bitch on this side of Kobe, and you ruined it. Garbage is better than what you deserve.”

And then he’s gone, catching up to Peko after a few seconds. She lingers by the bench, pulling on the hem of her skirt. She looks more uncomfortable than when Fuyuhiko saw her on that first day, and he wants to fix that. 

Fuyuhiko stands next to her, unsure what he’s supposed to do with his hands. “You wanna get out of here? After that, I think you have the right to skip the rest of the afternoon.”

Peko considers his offer carefully. Fuyuhiko can see the wheels in her brain turning as she frowns at the space around his left ear. It takes her a while to answer, but Fuyuhiko waits. She’s not the sort of person that skips and she has an honors student reputation to keep up. When he hears her say “No,” he expects those to be the reasons why. 

“I’m not going to run from him.” She says instead. “I’m hurt, but I’m not scared.”

“God.” Fuyuhiko can’t even begin to understand that sort of boldness, that sort of quiet audacity, but he can love it. And so he does, as if he ever had a choice in loving it in the first place. “Let’s get some food, then.”

The lunchline is quiet. Their return to the courtyard even more so. Fuyuhiko knows that he has mere minutes before some teacher interrogates him, so he shovels in as much food as he can fit in his mouth. Peko is reading, and he glances over to see her looking at...their history textbook? 

“What’s that for?” He asks, taking a break from eating to point at her book. 

Peko looks away from her book. “My rejection doesn’t mean we don’t have a test next period.”

Fuyuhiko is about to tell her that maybe she should take some time for herself, but he sees a determined glint in her eyes, one that makes his heart soar. “You’re gonna hit him where it hurts, aren’t you?”

“I’m aiming straight for the GPA.” She confirms, and Fuyuhiko laughs. Peko laughs with him and the laughter is shaky, but it’s there. That’s more than he has a right to ask for right now. 

When a teacher comes to grab him and interrogate him about what he did, Peko is still laughing, and that’s the sound Fuyuhiko is thinking about as he’s led away. It’s not as bad this time, being led away to get the scolding of a lifetime, because he knows that when it’s over, he has someone on the other side waiting for him. Someone who is more than worth getting a few detentions for.

**Author's Note:**

> these kids...............


End file.
